In the image of feudal society, the industrial society of the twentieth century – built around the great industrial firm – linked a mode of production and a mode of protection, and thus resolved, with the economic question, the social question. Post-industrial society, Daniel Cohen states in this work, "scientifically organizes the destruction of that industrial society." Twenty-first-century capitalism enshrines the separation of production and protection and, in "a Copernican inversion of the very foundations of wage labor, it will be the workers who suffer the risks, and the shareholders who seek protection."
This work analyzes the great ruptures that have led capitalism in the twenty-first century to the methodical destruction of that heritage: technological innovations, the financial revolution, the transformations of the modes of organization of work and the globalization of exchanges. And through an analysis of the logics that operate in these radical changes, these three lessons help to understand not only the current world, but, above all, the challenges of the future.